Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Up Front

The author and journalist Matt Taibbi has written about corruption in some of the world’s most powerful and secretive institutions. He knows something about Seth Rosenfeld’s struggles. The author of “Subversives,” which Taibbi reviews this week, sued the F.B.I. four times over 30 years to obtain records under the Freedom of Information Act. The F.B.I. spent close to a million dollars opposing him but eventually released 300,000 pages.

Photo

Matt TaibbiCredit
Illustration by Tina Berning

“I’ve had FOIA requests rejected out of hand in ways that were clearly illegitimate,” Taibbi said via e-mail. “I’ve filed several requests for information from the Federal Reserve that have gone either unanswered or been answered with odd delays. I think most reporters expect that they will not have easy access even to records they are legally entitled to see.”

Of course accessing information is just the beginning; shaping it into a story can be another trial. “It’s extremely difficult to make an even barely readable narrative out of a pile of documents,” he said. “I’ve done this before with things like court cases, but never anything on the scale that Rosenfeld did here. And he ended up with a very elegant and readable novel-style narrative, with recognizable characters and story lines to follow. It’s extremely impressive.”

Taibbi has covered his share of political and corporate malfeasance — recently, he’s been reporting on the Libor banking scandal — but he admits that several of Rosenfeld’s revelations about the F.B.I.’s covert activities in the 1960s surprised even him. “It is hard for me to accept that things like politically motivated break-ins and attempts to intentionally sabotage careers were routine.”